So, in the initial interview rounds you're not interviewed by the teams with open head count? Seems inefficient to me. How long does it normally take to find a team with a 'mutual fit'?
It's done that way to align incentives. The hiring manager's incentive is always to fill a role; if they didn't have more work than they can do, they wouldn't have open headcount. This biases them toward hiring fast and lowering the bar - not so much that they can't work with the person, but enough to overlook minor red flags in the interest of filling the position. In other words, the inefficiency is a feature, not a bug: the company doesn't want to hire fast if it means sacrificing quality.
It also has the added benefit of improving internal cooperation, trust, and mobility. Many big companies suffer from the attitude of "Oh, those doofuses in department X can't be trusted to get anything done right". [1] When you have a common hiring process, you know that everybody in the company passed the same bar you and your teammates did, and your baseline assumption should be that they're as competent. And similarly, transfers get pretty easy because everybody has already passed a common hiring bar, so you know that the candidate is already qualified technically, you just need to judge if they're a good fit for your team.
Time to find a mutual fit can vary a lot. It was really quick (like a couple days) my first time around, because I was early enough in my career to be pretty adaptable, had a very in-demand skillset (Javascript), and had multiple teams - Search, GMail, Docs - all vying for me. It was a lot slower (month+) my second time around, because I interviewed in April 2020 as the world was falling apart from COVID and teams kept disappearing as they got canceled or their headcount got cut.
I initially thought like this as well, but after second thought I'd like if all large corps did this. It eliminates "Bro-Hires", and sets certain standard for all employees.
Of course it doesn't make any sense for small companies.
My process with Google a couple of years back took something like 2 months before I bowed out. It included fun activities such as a hiring manager change, a re-interview of a slot, a down-level, and a resulting request to re-interview for things that weren't required at the higher level. Meanwhile Facebook went from first interview to offer in 2 weeks.
Can confirm that this is how it worked out for me just a few weeks ago. Interviewed for SWE II for a day, was told that feedback was trending positive, and spent ~4 hours of personal time prepping for and participating in fit calls.
Then got and excited call from my recruiter and was told I'd get an offer and that there was a match for one of the teams I interviewed for. The catch? Downleveled to SWE I, despite saying earlier in the process that I would not take it for career development and salary range reasons.
They were willing to set up another round of interviews to get more data, but at some point you just have to call it. End-to-end, this took around a month and a half. This was with my positive references allowing me to skip the phone screen.
I've had positive experiences interviewing with Microsoft and Amazon, no experience with other big tech.
I recently did this and it took ~1 month with me doing around 15 calls with various teams. I think I was atypically slow and most people find a team within 5 calls or so. The really unfortunate part is that you don't get any offer numbers until after this is done. That means lots of people will go through with the team matching even if they aren't really planning to go through with Google just to get offer numbers.
This is about maintaining quality. At a large company it’s easy for one manager to lower the bar, or have the bar fall out of entropy.
Several companies fight this with a standard interviewing pipeline, of course most candidates will be displeased if they spend 1 month interviewing and then get dropped into a random team.
I think they do so to avoid culture split - giving individual team hiring decision from the get go can create culture bias, people would only give opportunity to people they "like" or that match the current culture, leading to inbreeding of sort.
Just look at what was happening at Cisco with caste based hiring.
In my case it took about a week. I had a few phone calls with hiring managers over 2, then requested a follow-up with one manager which took another day or two to set up. Then once I gave the recruiter my preference, she got back to me the next day to let me know that it lined up with a manager who reciprocated
